Possibly it is not by accident that in a time of pending crisis, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones choose to visit Tel Aviv. Not that I have any insight into their doings. Possibly they do not want to be included in the vast horde mentality rising to a viral, global thug opinion as the age descends in a massive geriatric coronary. Because that which began at the Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan brought an electric guitar in 1965, is about to crash and burn. And this summer we will see the final descent of the Sixties. Because when the Hillary campaign collapses — “Bill II,” really, “Sixties II,” the sequel — so goes the generation.
Even before it descended to a mindless horde mentality — the organic product of a world without fences — it was the age of Samuel Beckett’s Lucky and Pozzo, panicked voices for the end of the world. But now the apocalypse passes and the millennium begins. ESPN announces that it will broadcast The International Dota 2 Championships, appropriately held in Seattle. New generations come, new worlds, visionary new games and Seattle appropriately their center. Kurt Cobain’s Seattle (Vancouver, too), the benign vortex of worlds ahead, rising and receding in war and peace. “Dota” is the acronym for “Defense of the Ancients,” an archetypal computer game which seems a combination of chess and warfare. It marks the age and its rising generations. The Germans will likely not win the $10 million pot as they consistently win world soccer. Probably the Chinese will.
{mosads}The Hillary campaign will fall apart in the next year and I would say the entire influence of the Sixties — the Clinton Age — will collapse with her. (We, the war babies, are 68 years old.) We have seen in the U.S. so far three eras now of mindless and random squalor and each was followed by a strong moral return: The era of the 1830s when New England was awash with religious cults, followed quickly then by British evangelicals, American abolitionists and the moral drive to the Civil War. Next, the Sixties and the Summer of Love and Woodstock, followed by Reagan/Thatcher and a return to moral order. Today we have defunct musicians of dead bands like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats actually guiding presidents and British prime ministers. But it is nature’s way for the collective psyche to react. My guess is former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) to bring this time that existential change and an ascent again to clarity and strength.
Our moment is an interim; a time of “mysterium tremendum” — Aldous Huxley’s phrase, or “numinous dread” — as four blood moons are said by rabbis and shamans to constellate important and dangerous events in the Holy Land. And this time it is different. As now for the first time virtually in millennia, there is dynamic movement afoot on Temple Mount, the most mysterious, enigmatic, most historically significant and to believers, the most holy place on earth. Possibly the world begins again there, as it did the last time.
“Poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg said, ‘He who controls the Mount, controls the land,'” Israel’s Knesset member Moshe Feiglin has said on various occasions. “The source is the Temple Mount.”
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.